Drupal is having its annual US conference in Boston on March 3-6:  DrupalCon 2008   I'm looking forward to going and finally meeting some of the leaders in this open source software movement. 

I'll be giving a couple presentations while there. 

The first is on Drupal Powered Ecommerce - there is a great set of (45 no less) modules that are available to build all sorts of different types of ecommerce stores.

Online, there are a few things needed to make a community succeed.  Great technology of course but I think the #1 thing is a lightning rod.
 
This was really driven home in this presentation looking at online communities.  There needs to be one person, or one personality who keeps the community growing.  It is not different than in the real world, where a rabbi or minister leads their congregation. 

One of the things I am exploring at Bear Ideas is how to help clients build and grow niche , local communities online.  The media giants have been swallowing up the very large online communities like myspace, friendster, flickr, youtube, facebook, etc.   And some newer ones focused on a particular area like technorati for blogs and yelp for reviews or 43places for travel.  All have large community components driving their content.

Read a very good article in the online edition of the Wall Street Journal today about how changing a simple thing like your domain name or your url paths can set you back in search.

Link to the article

Most people are using search as the front door to your business.  It is a great way to attract new customers.  They might search for your business name if you have an established brand, or they might just search for related topics.

If you have been editing your pages in frontpage or another editor like that and then transferring the pages via FTP, or writing documents in word and then sending them to (and likely paying) a webmaster to publish for you... having a content management system behind your site will be like getting handed a printing press in 1440.

Content management systems (CMS's) used to be very expensive investments, that only large companies were able to implement.  Interwoven implementations used to be $100K at the beginning of a deployment.

A revolution came about when open source CMS tools started appearing about 7 years ago.  These have evolved into very robust platforms that can run small sites and blogs, or enterprise scale systems.